Movies: Mass. native achieves dream of drawing in Pixar’s ‘Coco’

Monday

When Dean Kelly was growing up in Chelmsford, he had drawing on his mind. And Disney movies were a major part of pushing him along in putting his pens and pencils to paper.

Kelly now lives in Northern California, where he’s living out his dream as a team member at Pixar, and just served as lead story artist on Pixar’s newest feature “Coco.”

In an interview in Boston to promote the film, Kelly was asked to name an animated film he saw as a kid that got him thinking about doing this as a career and he listed: “Pinocchio,” “Peter Pan,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

Kelly said he learned about and practiced his craft at Rhode Island School of Design, later landed a job at a commercial animation studio in Minneapolis when his girlfriend (now his wife) wanted to move back there to be close to her family, and finally headed west, where he did character layout on “The Simpsons,” then character layout and storyboarding at Nickelodeon on “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

After sending his portfolio to Pixar, he scored a job as a member of the story artist team for them on “Monsters University.”

Kelly spoke about “Coco,” a story set in Mexico on The Day of the Dead, in which young Miguel tries to figure a way to share his love of music with his family, none of whom will even allow the sound of any music in their home. “Coco” opens in local theaters Wednesday.

What led up to you getting the job on “Coco?”

I was doing the storyboards on “Monsters University, and when Lee Unkrich (“Toy Story 3”), who had helped us on “Monsters University,” got the green light to direct “Coco,” he remembered seeing the work I was doing on those storyboards, and how cinematic they were. So, he called me into the story room and pitched me the story of “Coco.”

A young boy named Miguel is at the center of the story, but wasn’t the original idea quite different from how it turned out?

Oh, yes. It was about his mom, being on her deathbed. They lived in America, but the mom was from Mexico. So, the kid – who was initially named Marco – and his dad went down to Mexico to meet the mom’s side of the family. There were some great visuals for it, but the story was just too heavy for Pixar.

Tell me a little more about Miguel.

Miguel is a 12-year-old Mexican boy who grows up in a family of modest shoemakers. He’s next in line to become a shoemaker, but he doesn’t want to do that. He wants to be a musician, to play guitar. But something happened in his family’s past that he knows nothing about. Something involving music affected his great-great-grandmother, and she banned it from the family. Now he feels like he’s this black sheep, and doesn’t know how to connect to his family.

On The Day of the Dead, when Mexicans who celebrate it believe there’s an otherworldly connection you can have with people, Miguel is looking at the holiday as a means to an end to try to try to connect to his great-great-grandfather, who he believes to be a musician.

The film goes for and achieves a great amount of visual detail. Is that part of what falls under your responsibilities?

My main responsibility was to storyboard and draw and shoot the scenes I normally do, but then I would also go to small meetings with the director and writer and supervisor, talking about creating solutions for the film before the other story artists were brought in. There would be other meetings where we would talk about how dirty to make Miguel’s pants or how difficult would it be to have him put his hands in his hoodie all the time.

One thing that really stands out is whenever someone is playing guitar in the film, it looks absolutely real; all of the fingerings are exactly right. How did you go about that?

We brought in musicians who could play those chords, and the animators filmed them. That’s what animators usually do once a film gets into production. They will study behavior, and that’s how they bring stuff to life. With this, they made sure that in the film the fingers were touching and pushing down on the strings. I couldn’t believe the amount of detail they got for authenticity and believability.

Getting back to the story being heavy, there’s a point, as there have been in many Pixar films before it, where if audience members, of any age, don’t start crying, they probably don’t have any emotions. Is it a rule of Pixar films to make people cry, even if they’re happy tears?

I feel like the emotional aspect is something that we try to really dig deep for. We want to bring in real truths. That’s something I feel that cinema should be doing even for movies that mostly kids watch. I want kids to watch films and see the truth in life, and have them laugh and cry.

Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.

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